the love of the Saviour of the Church, "in nourishing and cherishing it." For a man doth not launch out into such a fervid description as this, without strong emotions of the value and excellency of what he so describes. Or, rather, one should say, the Holy Spirit, in filling the Apostle's mind with such high notions of the continual love and providence of Christ for His Church, as manifested in the efficacy which he gave to the water of Baptism, to sanctify and cleanse it, and in causing him thus to dwell on the purity thereby to be effected, must have intended to work a corresponding love in us, and to correct the cold and unloving sophisms of sense and reason about the power of Christ's institution. And yet I would confidently appeal to a large number of persons in the present day, whether, often as they have dwelt upon this animating description of the sanctification and spotlessness of Christ's Church, they have not (with a tacit feeling of not entering into them) passed by, almost unnoticed, the words "with the washing of water," to which, however, the Apostle throughout refers in his subsequent picture of the Church's unblemishedness? And if so, is it not time that we seek to correct this variance between the Apostle's feelings and our own[1]?
One might apply the same argument to the passages of St. John, (1 Epist. ii. 20, 27,) in which he speaks of the "anointing" which Christians had received from Christ. In each place he speaks of it as abiding in its effects; but in the latter (c. ii. 27,) as having been received of Christ at some former time. Here again it might be natural to infer that a gift, whose operation continued, but which is spoken of as having been formerly received, was first communicated at some particular time, and
- ↑ It is painful to see Calvin's continual anxiety lest too much should be attributed to the Sacrament, even while he rightly vindicates it. "It is as if he said that a pledge of that sanctification was given in Paptisra. Although we need a sound exposition here, lest men make themselves an idol out of the Sacrament (as often happens), through a perverse superstition," &c. and so on; and yet even he had to speak against others, who "toiled (sudant) in paring down and weakening this panegyric upon Baptism, lest too much should be assigned to the symbol, if it were called the bath of the soul.'* Ad loc.
